real interview stories, told over a cup of tea ♡
Interview Experiences
3935 interview stories from candidates at 857 companies: how each round went, what was asked and how it ended. Every company page links to practice questions in the same style.
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3935 results
- Resilience, Payments, and Concurrent DispatchDoorDash · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
The author describes an unsuccessful DoorDash interview process beginning with a coding screen about coordinating calls to downstream services. Follow-up discussion addressed failure handling, retries, and when requests should be allowed through or blocked during faults. The final interviews included a donation-service design covering payment processing, failures, lost connections, and duplicate…
- Resume Deep Dive, Then a Plant-Poisoning Grid ProblemApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
I think the team was TV. It was supposed to be a hiring manager round with one interviewer, but a different interviewer joined instead. He said we would be writing code, but then he suddenly started a deep dive into my resume and we talked for 20 minutes. Then he moved on to the problem, which was either whatever "Jiujiusi" is or plant poisoning. 0 is healthy and 1 is poisoned. If a healthy cell…
- Robot Coordination and File-Watcher DesignAmazon · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
The author describes a first-round Amazon phone interview organized into technical questions followed by leadership-focused discussion. The applicant reports completing an initial coding problem quickly. Additional technical topics concerned coordinating multiple robots in a restaurant and designing a Kafka-related file-watching system that could handle millions of files. The robot scenario requi…
- Round 2 With Two Coding Questions and a URL RouterGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Coding 1: LeetCode 210. The follow-ups were all very easy: Add a validity check Time/space complexity Test cases Change the output to a nested list Coding 2: Implement a URL request handler router that needs to support two functions: processHandler(String handler): registers a handler, for example /users/delete or /users/{userId}/photo/{photoId}. getHandler(String url): takes a real URL, for exam…
- SDE II Phone Screen and a No-Backtrack, No-Turns Maze ProblemAmazon · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
SDE II 09/02 Online Assessment 09/16 Phone Screen 20 minutes of deep-diving into my resume — tech stack choices, trade-offs, business logic, which part I was specifically responsible for, plus 2 Leadership Principles. 40 minutes of coding. I couldn't find the original problem online — it was a BFS reachability problem with direction vectors. X means you can't walk there, 0 means you can. Constrai…
- SDE-2 Loop with an AI-Assisted Design Round and a Linux cp Deep DiveMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Round 1 The first problem was a variant of Longest Repeating Character Replacement. We discussed both the brute-force and the optimal solution in the interview, and I implemented it. The second problem was a Medium-difficulty tree traversal question. We also discussed some basic DSA concepts. Round 2 Design a notification system for Windows that lets different applications generate and display no…
- Search Ranking and Team MatchingAirbnb · Machine Learning Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026
A referred applicant to Airbnb’s personalization and relevance organization reports recruiter contact after two weeks. An initial coding screen asked for book titles to be formatted as a table. Four days later, the applicant advanced to a virtual onsite covering document redaction, project decisions, search ranking without text queries, and retrieval-assisted guidance for customer-support staff.…
- Sensors, Camera Failures, and a False-Positive Case StudyRivian · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
A recruiter contacted me, and I then interviewed with the hiring manager for an autonomous-vehicle systems role. The interview lasted one hour and began with brief introductions from both of us. The manager then gave me a set of driving capabilities and asked how I would choose the types and placement of sensors needed to support those capabilities. Next, I was asked about the external failure mo…
- Seven-Hour Palo Alto Onsite, Failed at a Last-Minute HM RoundTesla · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
A few months ago an HR person from Tesla reached out to me about a senior SDE role on an infra team under Tesla AI. I originally didn't have much interest in Tesla, but HR said their package could go up to twice my current package, which instantly got my attention, so I went and did the whole loop. Tesla hires by team, so the interview process and content are entirely decided by the team. It star…
- Six Recorded Behavioral Questions, 1 Minute to Prep and 3 to AnswerIBM · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
Six questions in total, 1 minute to prepare, 3 minutes to answer. Questions: Tell me about a time you used an AI tool to help you create something. How did you work out what it could and could not do well, and what did you check or change before relying on its output? Tell me about a time something you created did not work as expected. How did you work out why, and looking back, what might you ha…
- Six Rounds, Then the Role Went On Hold and Was CancelledeBay · Applied Scientist · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
After six rounds of interviews they told me straight up that the position was on hold, and a month later they let me know the position had been cancelled. I suspect the interviewers had known about this for a long time, which is why the interviews were so all over the place and never lined up with anything. The questions I spent ages preparing were basically wasted effort. I'm sharing the questio…
- Six-Day Workweek Question and a Two-Level Flight Search OARetell AI · Software Engineer · New Grad · Online Assessment · Sep 2026In progress
I mass-applied about a month ago, got an update a week ago, and dragged my feet on the OA until the deadline before I finally did it. Recruiter interview: right off the bat they asked whether I could accept working six days a week, then it was just some basic questions (project, tech stack, trade-offs). OA: Not hard overall, but there's a lot of text, so you have to actually read it. Implement a…
- Solved Both Screens, Then RejectedNextdoor · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
This was for a Senior general SDE role, so there were two phone screens. Both were known questions. I had prepared every question in the question bank, written each one out once, and prepared all the follow-ups. I don't think there should have been any problems with my answers. Merge weekday time intervals: I could define the input and output formats myself. I chose ["Mon 09:00", "Mon 17:00"]. In…
- Speculative Decoding in a 60-Minute ML Coding RoundSpaceX · Research Scientist · New Grad · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
There were two 60-minute interviews: an ML coding round and a research chat. The ML coding round asked me to implement speculative decoding. I needed to write one normal decoding function and one speculative decoding function. The speculative function had the following interface in the prompt: The test case required the speculative-decoding implementation to produce its output faster than the nor…
- SQL Interrupted and a Shortened Phone ScreenAmazon · Business Intelligence Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
I'd interviewed for Amazon BIE twice before. This was my third time, and the content was different every time. There aren't many related questions shared, so I'm contributing my experience to give everyone a sense of the difficulty. SQL: Write a query to find departments where more than 50% of employees exceeded their quarterly targets, but the department's overall sales growth is below the compa…
- Straight-to-Code Phone Screen, Multi-Family Unit Conversion Graph in JavaApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
I had prepped for a resume deep dive or BQ, but the moment it started, without a word, we went straight into the problem. It's been a long time since I had such a pure interview. It was a variant of LC 3535 (unit conversion), which I'd also seen in an earlier interview report. The difference is that there's more than one family of unit conversions, e.g. temperature is one series and length is ano…
- String Compression, Longest Increasing Path, and a Kafka Trace-Grouping DesignNew Relic · Backend Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Question 1: Implement a method that does basic string compression by counting consecutive repeated characters. If the compressed string is not shorter than the original string, return the original string. Discuss time complexity and space complexity Discuss edge cases Discuss code optimization Question 2: Longest Increasing Path in a Matrix. You can only move in four directions (up, down, left, r…
- Strong Coding, Closed Out as a Borderline Case After the Virtual OnsiteOpenAI · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
Overall, I just did my best (shrug). Phone screen: Coding — "infection," 3/5. I got stuck on a bug on the third question and spent about 15 minutes debugging it. System design: chess. Interviewed on a Thursday, heard back that I passed by the following Monday. Virtual Onsite: Coding — IP address, 3.5/5. I got to the IPv6 part of the question and was hunched over looking up how to write a BigInteg…
- Supercharger System Design Where I Never Got Past the First RequirementTesla · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
I was asked to design a supercharger with 3 requirements: FR1: Billing / amount of energy delivered (stored in the backend) FR2: Health metrics/telemetry from the supercharger stall (long-term data store) FR3: Screen/in-car application: touch the map, nearest available supercharger (price) I tried to follow the script and design an HLD per FR as quickly as possible, but the interviewer wanted to…
- Superday With a Case Study and an AI-Assisted Coding RoundCapital One · Software Engineer · Intern · Onsite · Sep 2026
The Superday was three parts, behavioral (standard), case study, and AI assisted coding. The case study covered the use of virtual credit cards and had multiple sub-parts. After weighing the tradeoffs of virtual cards, you analyze some virtual card numbers and see what specific conditions they fulfill and you debug some code regarding the conditionals for filtering these card numbers. The AI assi…
- System Design Round: Build an Eval Platform for AI AgentsCresta · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
System design round They have you design an eval system to evaluate the results of an Agent using different models, e.g. tool usage, response speed, plus testing different system prompts, that kind of thing. The original question is below: > Design a system for evaluating AI agents. Users of the system are going to be teams developing AI agents, e.g. agents which automatically analyze contact cen…
- System Design With a Phone-Scrolling Interviewer, Then an OfferCapital One · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026Offer
After three months of interviewing, I finally landed a Lead Software Engineer job at Capital One. A bit of background: I've been the lead engineer at a fairly small company for close to ten years, and almost everything I know came from doing the work. I had barely touched LeetCode-style problems, and my system design knowledge came only from the systems I'd built at my job. To get through the tec…
- Task Scheduler Phone Screen, AI Optional, RejectedRippling · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
Sharing my Rippling phone screen. Phone screen, first round (coding): The problem was something like a task scheduler, but the requirements were very complicated and there were a huge number of conditions. It's not hard, but the details explode. Roughly: Tasks have dependencies, and when outputting I had to output the dependency first and then the task itself. Tasks have various attribute require…
- Technical Round Skipped, Final Round Is Just HR and Salary TalkTemu · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
Last time I mentioned that after a 2.5-hour second round I felt like I'd failed, but I actually hadn't. The second-round interviewer (the dept lead) decided to skip the third-round technical round entirely, so my third round ended up being the final round too — just a chat with HR. A bit about my background, some basic behavioral questions, and then talking about what it's like working there and…
- Technical Screen on Finding the Camera Super AdminVerkada · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Problem description In an enterprise role- and group-based permission system (RBAC), there are three kinds of entities: users (User), groups (Group), and cameras (Camera). The input is a list of permission relations, perms_data, where every element is a triple (source, relationship, destination). There are two core relationships: "camera_owner": the format is (entity, "camera_owner", camera_id).…
- Three OA Problems, One a Pizza Discount SimulationAmerican Express · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
First question: given a 3x3 grid with stones placed on it — some cells may have more than one stone, and some cells may be empty — move stones between adjacent cells so that every cell ends up with exactly one stone. Find the minimum number of moves needed. This corresponds to LeetCode 2850, Minimum Moves to Spread Stones Over Grid. Second question: given a set of 2D coordinate points (x, y) and…
- Three Onsite Rounds, Kicked Out of the Meeting Room Mid-InterviewMercor · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
I finished interviewing at this company yesterday. My background is physics AI. I did competitive programming back in high school, and I figured I could cram a system design book for a few days and pass this onsite. Turns out I was still too green. The questions were pretty standard; it's on me for being too weak and wasting the opportunity. The interview was chaotic: in the middle of it, people…
- Three Parts Passed Before Time Ran OutPinterest · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
The phone screen used the familiar Pins Violation Log problem. The input was a list of violation logs already sorted by timestamp. Each record had the form [postId, policy, timestamp]. There were five parts: Count unique posts by policy. Get the policies violated by a post. Count unique posts at a timestamp. Count unique posts in a time range. Count violations by policy in a time range. I had to…
- Three Rounds and an HR Call, Then SilenceByteDance · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026No response
I interviewed with TT USDS: three rounds, then an HR call, and then I never heard anything back. I don't know whether I got rejected. Round 1: two coding questions, LeetCode 3 and LeetCode 210. Round 2: a variant of LeetCode 207. I forgot how it was changed. For the rest of the time they kept asking me tech questions about monitoring, tracing, and telemetry. Round 3: system design. Design a payme…
- Three Rounds Ending in an On-site Factory Tour and a DAG Critical-Path ProblemHadrian · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Applied online and a recruiter reached out. Their process is like this: Round 1 1 hr live coding phone screen Round 2 45-min leadership/behavioral with an engineering director 60-min system design Round 3 On-site in Torrance with a factory tour 30-min "partnership" interview (working with non-technical stakeholders) 1 hr coding Problem: A work order is modeled as a DAG. Nodes are operations (mach…
